Celeste’s New Update Clears Speedrun Times in Fixing Time-Saving Exploit

Celeste’s New Update Clears Speedrun Times in Fixing Time-Saving Exploit

Matt Makes Games's Celeste may be ruffling a few feathers with a recent update that retcons all speedrun times following an exploit patch.

It’s hard not to love Celeste — a personal tale of overcoming hardship and mental anguish, the game is alright being noted as an indie darling and frontrunner for many of 2018’s Game of the Year headlines. In their effort to continually perfect the game and keep it fairly competitive in the right sections, developer Matt Makes Games has issued an update for PC (eventually coming to consoles) that will fix a speedrunning exploit, retconning the current standings and scores in the process.

News comes from Celeste‘s official dev blog, where the update — titled V1.2.1.0 — was fully detailed. Although most everything falls into the general bug and glitch fix category, the notable change is to the speedrunning exploit. According to the patch notes, the Chapter timer would pause during deaths, cutscenes, and in-game menus originally. The gaming community (in typical min-max gaming community fashion) used this feature to retry different stages of a Chapter. However, developer Matt Makes Games is a speedrun purist and wanted to remove that option from Celeste players’ toolbox:

The Chapter timer no longer pauses during deaths, cutscenes, and in-game menus. Previously it was possible to exploit the timer by retrying on some screen transitions, which we didn’t feel was a fun way to play.

Obviously, no good deed goes unpunished so this does have the obvious drawback: speedrun times for single-chapters will be cleared. However, the development team decided to make this change now “while the game is still early in its speedrun life.”

While the update is currently available for PC, console players shouldn’t feel too left out. According to one of the lead developers Noel Berry, console players can expect the update “soon”: